What to expect in AngularJS 1.4

The upcoming release of AngularJS 1.4 is good news for aficionados, offering hope for the 1.x series. In a bid to make the planning process as transparent as possible, the team have opened up all development for feedback.

Late last year, the AngularJS Team got together to begin planning the release of AngularJS 1.4, which will receive attention throughout 2015. Brian Ford, of the core Angular team, made the point to document the targets they’re aiming for on the AngularJS blog.

Themes and targets

The release has been timed to coincide with ng-conf in early March, with Ford being listed as one of the speakers. Changes and progress can be followed on the tracking spreadsheet and includes:

New router for Angular 1 and 2

Internalization

Simplify usage and maintenance of forms

Improving $http

Better performance for $parse

Redesign of documentation

Breaking changes are also expected to feature in 1.4, which trumps the minor version number. A new module.component helper will be provided, along with further partitioning of AngularJS into smaller optional modules.

The parallel development of Angular 1.x and 2.0 is a welcome step forward for many developers, who worry that the new direction of 2.0 would result in a withdrawal of Google’s support for 1.x.

However, while there are plans for 1.5, AngularJS tech lead Pete Bacon Darwin isn’t sure of how many more versions there will be:

It is not possible to say how many more big releases AngularJS 1.x will have before it goes into maintenance mode. There are many factors including how well the increased release frequency works out in practice, how long until Angular 2 is released, how quickly people adopt Angular 2 and whether we can get to a stage where we feel that we can do no more to improve AngularJS 1.x.

New milestones and labels are also in the works, with development set for 1.4x on the master branch. The primary focus will be the changes highlighted by the community and already tabled in the progress spreadsheet.

The Angular 1.3.x branch will receive version specific fixes backported from master, while the 1.2.x branch will now only receive fixes for major security issues.

The team hope to make the entire process of development more transparent and inclusive for others, uploading their planning meeting online for all to see. Contributions and feedback from the rest of the community are also being welcomed via GitHub.